Did you hear about the old man whose birthday one year lasted only one minute?
It was his sixty-second birthday.
William C. DeVriesBorn 19 Dec 1943. American heart surgeon who made the first human implant of a permanent artificial heart, the Jarvik-7, into terminally ill cardiac patient, 61-year-old Barney Clark on 2 Dec 1982, at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. He survived for 112 days, but was never strong enough to leave the hospital. The device, invented by Robert K. Jarvik, pumped blood through tubes powered by an external compressor. Four more attempts at permanent implants were made, but then abandoned as technical problems of the Jarvik-7 remained unsolved. The second, and longest survivor, was William J. Schroeder who received a Jarvik-7 on 25 Nov 1984 at the Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville, Ky. He lived 620 days, dying in Aug 1986 at age 54.« |
